Tenth Anniversary of Poor Quality News Reporting on Katrina
It is almost hard to believe how bad the news reporting was on Katrina's aftermath.
WeatherData, Inc. (now AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions), by 10am on the 29th, had informed its clients that the levees had breached. As I write in Warnings, I boarded a business flight late the morning of the 29th and, when I reached my hotel in Charlotte, I turned on the television and expected to see non-stop coverage of the rising waters. I was flabbergasted that, even on "Nightline" at 11:30pm, there was no realization that things were getting worse rather than better. People were literally drowning due to the rising water yet no one outside New Orleans (and our clients) seemed to know about it.
On the 30th, the networks finally reported that New Orleans had flooded but got just about everything else wrong.
If you would like to learn about what went wrong with the news coverage, in addition to my book, Warnings, you can click here, here and here. The last link is to an article about the utter political confusion that, to be fair, made covering the aftermath of Katrina even more difficult.
WeatherData, Inc. (now AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions), by 10am on the 29th, had informed its clients that the levees had breached. As I write in Warnings, I boarded a business flight late the morning of the 29th and, when I reached my hotel in Charlotte, I turned on the television and expected to see non-stop coverage of the rising waters. I was flabbergasted that, even on "Nightline" at 11:30pm, there was no realization that things were getting worse rather than better. People were literally drowning due to the rising water yet no one outside New Orleans (and our clients) seemed to know about it.
On the 30th, the networks finally reported that New Orleans had flooded but got just about everything else wrong.
If you would like to learn about what went wrong with the news coverage, in addition to my book, Warnings, you can click here, here and here. The last link is to an article about the utter political confusion that, to be fair, made covering the aftermath of Katrina even more difficult.
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